


Learning Together

by She5los



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Breaking cycles of abuse, Domestic, Domestic Fluff, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Pretend Violence, School trauma, Sensory Overload, no beta we die like Glenn, parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-04
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-22 14:02:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22564558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/She5los/pseuds/She5los
Summary: Ferdinand and Hubert have long since settled into their roles as Adrestia's Prime Minister and Minister of the Imperial Household.  Raising a daughter, however, presents new challenges as they deal with their own relationships with their fathers and realized exactly how fucked up their childhoods were.Ch. 1: Ferdinand wins a parent-teacher conferenceCh. 2: Hubert deals with insecurity from his father's abuse when he starts teaching his daughter espionage skills.
Relationships: Ferdinand von Aegir/Hubert von Vestra
Comments: 28
Kudos: 194





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bohemienne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bohemienne/gifts).



> This is based on a very short Twitter convo with Bohemienne about whether Ferdie or Hubert would be scarier at a parent-teacher conference, which promptly gave me brainworms.
> 
> I don’t know which husband is trans, but they sure do have a kid. Jocelyn, Jacey for short, is eight years old with long, black hair. She decided she was a girl when she was four years old and met Dorothea and Petra and couldn’t figure out which one of them she wanted to be when she grew up.
> 
> Ferdinand tends to call Jacey “sweetie,” “darling,” etc., but Hubert nicknamed her after himself. He’s a shadow, so she’s a soot smudge. He’s a spider, so she’s a mite. He calls her these things with an embarrassing amount of affection in his voice. As far as Ferdinand and Hubert’s titles, Ferdinand is Daddy and Hubert is Father. Hubert can’t call Ferdinand “daddy” without sounding sarcastic, but he does it to keep from confusing their child.
> 
> I’m a fan of autistic Ferdie, and I wrote Jocelyn autistic, as well, to exorcise my own school-related demons. There was definitely a moment when Hubert and Ferdinand were observing her at preschool and Ferdinand said, “See? She is playing exactly like a normal child!” and then, a moment later, realized most of the other children were playing with their peers instead of playing by themselves.

It was never anything short of a miracle when the Aegir-Vestra household was able to eat together. A child complicated things, since there was no more grabbing a quick bite with his husband and joking it was family dinner, but they both felt more of a sense of obligation now that Jacey was at home. There was someone who needed them and couldn’t simply put her personal feelings aside out of understanding that the Empire needed them.

And Hubert missed her, too.

Children were different every day, and it sounded horrifyingly close to a platitude, but it was true. Just last month, Hubert had been called away overnight and come home to find his daughter with one fewer teeth than when he’d left the previous morning. And that was, in all honesty, nothing compared to the first couple years, when her size, proportions, coordination, interests, and yes, her number of teeth, would all change from one day to the next. (What was with children and teeth? Why was the natural human body, in its completely normal course of growing, more viscerally horrifying than any spell Hubert could design, and why was the reason for that always tooth-related?) This particular day, his daughter had a math test, so he was excited to hear her expound on her own talents.

He and Ferdinand got out of their carriage. He cracked his neck and Ferdie squared his shoulders and stood up straight, and they walked into their house. They had just managed to be on time for dinner (the Goddess Hubert had never believed in was welcome to bless housekeepers and nurses who kept children on a regular schedule) so after a short trip to their bedroom to change into less formal clothes, they made their way downstairs.

They had just sat down when Jacey appeared in the dining room, smiling and welcoming them home.

“Good to be home, darling!” Ferdinand greeted her. “How was your day at school? Did you learn a lot? How was your math test?”

And, without a moment’s hesitation, Hubert’s daughter, his soot smudge, his perfect little smidgeon, burst into tears.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Ferdie cood, and pulled the girl onto his lap. Hubert tamped down on the familiar tingle of dark magic playing around his fingertips. “Jacey, what’s wrong? You like math.”

Hubert looked to his daughter’s nurse, who shook her head and said, “She wasn’t like this earlier. She’s been fine since I picked her up from school…”

“Go have some dinner,” Ferdinand advised quietly over the little girl he was bouncing on his knee. “We’ll handle this.” Then he pulled Jacey against his chest and asked, “What has you so upset, cuddle-bug? I won’t be mad, I promise.”

The gist of the minutes-long, tearful confession was: their little smidgeon had thought the math test would be mostly multiplication and normal division, which she knew well from her homework and from previous tests, and instead, it was nearly half long division, which Jacey had thought her class was only starting. By the end of the story, Jacey had been bounced on Ferdinand’s knee and had her hair stroked and gotten enough hugs that she was more or less fine, but she couldn’t look either of them in the eye, and that simply wouldn’t stand.

“Jocelyn, you know your father and I aren’t going to simply abandon you, right?” Ferdinand asked as their little smudge picked at her dinner. “What do we do in this house when someone has been wronged?”

The answer she had been raised with, of course, was: we make it right. Between the Left Hand of the Emperor and the Prime Minister of Adrestia, they usually managed to make that happen, too.

“I haven’t been _ wronged,” _ Jocelyn said instead, staring very determinedly at her plate. “I’m just dumb.” Her eyes shone again, threatening more tears.

“You are certainly not,” Ferdinand told her, in something like the tone Hubert’s nurse used to use when he copied the swear words his father used. “Ask Miss Lettie to teach you long division and I promise you will pick it up in no time. No, we fix it, Jocelyn. Your daddy wrote the education laws; there is simply no way Mrs. Mason was following all the guidelines if a good student like you was blindsided like this.”

"Can Father just poison Mrs. Mason?" Jocelyn grumbled.

"Father doesn't poison anyone anymore," Ferdinand said with a shocking air of finality.

"Oh, Father definitely still poisons people," Hubert said, hoping Jocelyn didn't see the desperate eyes he was making at Ferdinand, wondering why he would say something so blatantly untrue. Ferdinand shot back a slightly panicked shrug. "But only people who are cruel and immoral in ways that go above and beyond. Come to think of it, though, if Mrs. Mason made my favorite little dust mite feel stupid, she may actually deserve--"

"That is quite enough of that," Ferdinand interrupted, cutting Hubert off with a glare. "All your father means, Jacey, is that it was not your fault and we will not let this happen to you again." He reached out to touch Jocelyn's shoulder and added, "It was never your fault, darling. No matter how much it feels like it is. I will look over my schedule tomorrow morning and send Mrs. Mason a request for a chat.”

.-._.-._.-._

“You’re sure you want to be the one to talk to the teacher?” Hubert asked as they were preparing for bed. He’d been sullen all evening. He’d never liked to admit how much Jocelyn’s troubles affected him.

“Completely,” Ferdie reassured him, putting on a breezy demeanor to hide the way he wanted to challenge the woman to armed combat instead of a battle of wits. “I did write the education reform legislation, after all; it seems only fair I should be allowed to present it.”

“Just saying,” Hubert said, mimicking Ferdinand’s casual air but doing it very badly, “I do tend to intimidate people. It could be helpful.”

Ferdinand laughed. He laughed from deep in his gut. Hubert truly had no idea of the effect either of them had on people. “You are too much in love with me, my moon,” he teased. “You have no idea how people think of either of us.” He unpinned his brooch on the fourth try (blasted tiny clasp) and went to sit next to Hubert on the bed as he unbuckled his boots. “You scare people at the first, but when you sit down with them and reach an agreement, they always feel you have come to a truce. They believe they have appeased you and will hear no more on that topic.”

“And they don’t feel that way after talking to you?” Hubert goaded. “People are  _ floored  _ by you, Ferdie. Don’t sell yourself short.”

“Oh, no, you misunderstand,” Ferdinand told his husband, grinning. He could feel murderous energy coming from his eyes and did nothing to stop it. “I do not want her to feel we have reached an agreement. I want her to feel that she owes me.”

Hubert paused, the way he did when Ferdinand allowed himself to act less than friendly. It always surprised him, somehow. Then he turned back to his own boots and said, “I see.”

.-._.-._.-._

Ferdinand breezed into Jocelyn’s schoolroom with a small box of almond pastries and freshly scribed copies of the relevant sections of the Adrestian Primary School Learning Standards, Adrestian Primary School Accommodation Standards, and Imperial Institute of Educator Licensing Standards and Best Practices. He re-introduced himself to Mrs. Mason (people tended not to forget him, but it was polite) and sat down at the table she gestured him to. Jocelyn took a seat next to him, looking distinctly embarrassed.

The trick to diplomacy, Ferdinand had learned early on, was that it was all about asserting dominance early and often. You couldn’t do it by acting aggressive. You just had to show up prepared and act with confidence and grace and let it take other people by surprise.

“It was so interesting to see this from a parent’s perspective,” he pointed out, all smiles, once the basic niceties were over. “I suppose everyone has troubles in school they can look back on, but it really is a wonder to think: of all things, long division! It seems so trivial. Even Jocelyn agreed, once her nurse had caught her up: it is simply a bit of division with a touch of subtraction thrown in. Nothing an eight-year-old should be unable to do.” He squared the papers in front of him.

“I know it seems simple now,” Mrs. Mason countered, “But we did devote a good amount of class time to it. Encountering a concept for the first time can make it difficult.”

“Oh, I agree, of course,” Ferdie said. “But I did look over Jacey’s homework. Could I direct you to the Primary School Accommodation Standards, this section right here?” He turned his current page toward the teacher. He had gone over certain sentences with thinned ink and a paintbrush, the way he did when he was editing legal documents and wanted to ensure he knew which sections his notes were referring to. The section read:  _ All testing and graded work shall have a roughly similar amount of ungraded and un-timed work, such as in-class examples or homework problems, preceding it to ensure students have a chance to practice work before it is judged _ .

"We did practice problems," Mrs. Mason insisted. "Was I supposed to count the exact number of problems? It was over the course of a week." She pointed to the text and added, "See there? 'Roughly.' A teacher is allowed to use their judgment."

_ Yes, but a teacher is  _ not _ allowed to make my daughter cry _ , Ferdinand thought to himself.

Instead, he said, "It had been a week, but somehow Jocelyn was under the impression that the unit had only just started. Can you think why that would be?"

"Because she hadn't taught it to us yet," a little voice piped up from somewhere around Ferdinand's shoulder. He turned to look at Jocelyn and raised his eyebrows and she clarified: "She didn't make it… make sense? I dunno. We never talked about why it works. We just did some problems in class, and then we didn't have it in our homework until right before the test." She was hugging her arms close to herself, kneading the muscles of one forearm with her hand, not looking up for more than a scant second at a time.

"Ah," Ferdinand said, turning back toward Mrs. Mason. "Then we want the Educator Licensing Standards." He put a hand on Jocelyn's back briefly to reassure her, and then he reached for the page with the blue markings on it.

.-._.-._.-._

It was a uniquely powerful feeling, Ferdinand decided as he walked Jocelyn home, to walk into a meeting with all your facts together, never act any way but friendly and cordial, and still decisively  _ win _ . He had already known as much about his work meetings -- after all, what was a Prime Minister’s job but to convince everybody to agree on a course of action? -- but he certainly enjoyed learning it held true in less formal settings. He felt entirely confident that he had adequately spooked Jocelyn’s teacher into holding to the teaching guidelines they had discussed.

“How are you feeling now, darling?” he asked Jocelyn. She’d mostly spoken only when asked her opinion, but Ferdie remembered how intimidating adults had seemed when he was young; perhaps that was all that had been bothering her.

She chewed on the inside of her lip and then said, with a voice that wavered, “I’m sorry I need so much extra help.”

She was a perfect reflection of the way Ferdinand had been as a child, and perhaps always would be. He, too, had felt confident in school until the exact moment the rug was pulled out from under him, and then thought he must be the only one feeling that way. “It is anything but extra,” he said, since she had just watched him not-so-gently remind her teacher of her legal responsibilities. “In fact, the things Mrs. Mason and I discussed are meant to be the bare minimum. Your job is to learn, but her job is to teach, and she was only teaching in a way  _ some  _ children could learn from. I only hope I kicked up enough of a fuss that she will not fall back on bad habits in a month or two.”

A little hand latched onto his own gloved one. When he looked down, Jocelyn didn’t look any less sullen.

He squeezed her hand to get her attention and said, “There were other children who felt the same way, I promise. Did you tell any of your classmates about the trouble you had with the test?”

Jacey shook her head.

“Then is it not reasonable to think the exact same thing happened to some of them, and they simply did not tell you?”

After several seconds, he heard a very quiet, “I guess.”

“It could even be that it happened to some of your classmates in totally different subjects,” Ferdie pointed out. “That they had trouble with grammar, or many-digit multiplication, or geography. But none of your classmates has a daddy who makes the laws for the whole Empire, so I was very happy to be able to help out.”

Jocelyn nodded. This was the point when Ferdinand was supposed to offer a particularly tempting dessert as a distraction, right? It would work -- it had worked, every time he’d done it before -- but he needed her to know how completely the whole situation wasn’t her fault.

“The reason I wrote those laws was so nobody could make children like you feel this way,” Ferdinand admitted. “I spent a very long time reading about how children learn, and asking people about their own bad experiences, and then I wrote down the rules for the whole Empire to follow based on the idea that nobody should feel ashamed for not learning something when they were never taught it properly.” He tried to think of a good example. What was a way Jocelyn tended to break their household rules? “When you started to learn espionage, did I blame you for sneaking up on me in my study, or did I blame your father for telling you to?”

A smile that was just short of a laugh snuck onto Jacey’s face. “You yelled at Father.”

“I did. I yelled very loudly and indignantly at Father.” The whole incident had been silly, but it certainly had caused his adrenaline to spike. “Because Father knows the rules of the house, right?”

Jacey nodded.

“Exactly. He knows all the rules, and he helped make them in the first place. You were being a very good little girl and doing exactly what your father said, just the same way I am sure you were a very good student who followed along in Mrs. Mason’s class. You did just what you were told, and I was not about to give you a hard time for it when it was Mrs. Mason who was breaking the rules. Do you understand?”

Jocelyn nodded, and she was smiling, and she looked more animated as she walked next to him. Good.

“Excellent. Now, strawberry tarts and honey blend for tea, yes? Then your father will not regret that he was unable to come.”


	2. Espionage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hubert teaches Jocelyn all the important things she'll need to know as a Vestra. He can't help remembering the way his own father taught him those skills, and he faces some insecurity about his father's role in his life for the first time in years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a much more trauma-heavy chapter! It engages really directly with a snippet Bohemienne posted that hasn't been published in a fic yet ( https://twitter.com/Bohemienne6/status/1219336354183684096 ) (I'm just hoping it doesn't change too much before posting). Please check the new tags if you're worried.
> 
> Is there any more universal experience than crawling up on your dad's lap to check out what he's doing? My dad did logic puzzles, my mom's dad tried to teach her nuclear physics, are we all just nerds or is it as universal as watching sports with your dad for the express purpose of stealing his Chex mix (and picking all the rye chips out for yourself)?
> 
> Fun fact: I'm the same height as Edelgard, so however tall Jocelyn grows up to be, I can tell you for certain it's Too Tall.

Years ago, before children, before marriage, if Hubert had been asked when a child could start learning espionage skills, he probably would have guessed seven or eight. Old enough to have a firm grasp on reading, certainly. Who knew when a child had enough of a memory to replace an item in exactly the spot it had been in before? Certainly not Hubert.

Years ago, before children, Hubert had had no concept of how children tended to squirm their way into your study and end up in your lap uninvited.

Or how they always had to have an opinion, no matter whether they knew what was going on or not.

Presently, he was absently bouncing a six-year-old on his knee as she sounded out the nonsense words of the cipher he was practicing. And he, an idiot, started along the slippery slope of asking, “Would you like to learn how to make your own silly words like this?”

Jocelyn gasped, and bounced up and down, and yelled “Yes!” almost directly into his ear as she flung her tiny noodle arms around his neck, so he pulled out a fresh sheet of paper to begin a new key for a rotation cipher. Nothing like the complex work he’d been trying, but probably around the level of complexity a child’s first cipher should have.

“We write out the alphabet like this, first. Can you sing your alphabet for me?” he asked to distract her while he raced to write out the whole thing without letting her attention run out. Thankfully, she detached herself from his neck while she sang.

“Now, where should we start it this second time?” he asked when the first alphabet was done. There were all sorts of different ways to mix up the alphabet, but rotation ciphers and their ilk weren’t useful, anyway; they were just easy and fun.

Jocelyn pointed halfway down the page.

“That was not quite my meaning,” Hubert told her, trying his best not to laugh at her. “In a  _ cipher _ , you write a letter that means a different letter. When we write an A, what other letter should it mean?”

Jocelyn took on the same stillness that Ferdie did when he was presented with an unexpected puzzle, and then she smiled at him and said, “J!”

“J for Jocelyn,” Hubert told her approvingly. “Excellent.” He started writing the rotated alphabet under his other letters. “So, we write A, B, C, and so on, and then eventually, we come to--  _ at some point, _ we come to the end, to Z, and...” he paused as he got to the end, to Q, and then challenged her with, “Guess what we do next.”

His dust mite leaned over the paper, and Hubert obligingly moved his hand away from the text.

When Jocelyn was small (well, smaller), Hubert had constantly been in awe of what she  _ didn’t  _ know, all the many things that had been obvious for as long as he could remember, that he watched her learn for the first time. It had made him acutely aware that there had, in fact, been a time before he knew how to swallow his own saliva (let alone food); a time before he knew what a word  _ was _ , let alone how to say them himself; and even a time before he knew what his feet were and where he could find them.

Ciphers were the same, probably. There must have been a time before he knew book-keyed ciphers, before he knew rotation or two-letter ciphers. There must have been a time when he, too, would have looked at the half-complete doubled alphabet on the page and felt truly in awe of the sheer number of possibilities presenting themselves. He was suddenly overwhelmed with the amount he would get to teach his daughter about the endless puzzles and games that a young up-and-coming spymaster would play to learn the basics.

“After Q comes…?” he prompted, in the interest of not overwhelming his six-year-old.

After a moment of mumbling the alphabet song to herself, she proudly yelled, “R!”

“Yes. And which letter do you think the R should go under, since we already reached Z?”

Jocelyn stared at the page again in tense concentration. Then she pointed to the A.

“Exactly right,” Hubert told her, and remembered to keep bouncing his leg as he wrote out the rest of the alphabet until he wrote out a Z under his previous I. “That’s why we call it a rotation cipher: it’s a cipher that goes in a circle, so the Z meets back up with the A, like so. Now, what should I write in our J-for-Jocelyn cipher?”

Jacey grinned at him and yelled her own name, so he wrote out JOCELYN and began showing her how to match up the letters to make the much less sensible name AFTVCPE. They both tried pronouncing it a few times, and then he challenged her to try turning it back and she smiled and set to work.

.-._.-._.-._

They played games, mostly: sneaking games, memory games, code-breaking games, all consequence-free, and Hubert had a very long think about what it meant that Jocelyn improved by leaps and bounds.

That certainly hadn’t been Hubert’s childhood. He had done all of it, the sneaking challenges, the memory challenges, the timed ciphers, but all of it with the threat of punishment hanging over his head. Sharpening his mind, he’d thought at the time. Pushing him forward so he wouldn’t lose his nerve when he did, inevitably, have to perform under the very real threat of bodily harm if he was found out. It was what his father told him, and he hadn’t known better than to believe him.

He wasn’t sure he  _ could  _ hurt Jocelyn, even if it would keep her from greater harm later. She was… precious. Innocent. That was the same girl who had rolled about on a blanket on the floor, before she was even able to crawl, and looked up at Hubert with open adoration shining out from her eyes, a broad grin spreading across her face as she babbled. The girl who had sung loudest in her preschool’s Solstice recital and then promptly left the stage to jump up onto Ferdinand’s lap. She seemed to Hubert about as perfect as any human being could be. He couldn’t rob her of the excited grins she saved just for the moments when Hubert decided he had enough time set aside to set a new puzzle for her.

When she was nine and started learning about armed assassination, the problems Hubert had very intentionally not been dealing with caught up with him full-force.

“I’m going to give you a knife,” Hubert told his daughter very seriously, and pulled the object in question from his desk. “This knife.” He tapped the “blade” against his ungloved palm a few times, saying, “I’ve had it ground down, so there is no way to hurt somebody with this knife without a great deal of effort.” He rubbed his thumb down the blade and then handed it to Jacey, who tested the bluntness herself. “That is your knife for practice. You can hold onto it and keep it on your person. You will be able to do everything you need to without actually hurting anybody. There are violent acts a Vestra needs to deaden themself to, but that will not be for many years yet. For now, understand that there is nothing you can do with this knife that will hurt your practice victim.”

“I understand,” Jacey told him solemnly, still testing every part of the knife with her sensitive fingers.

“Assassination by throat-slitting is barely called for these days,” Hubert told her. “We are in an unprecedented era of peace, and it looks to stay that way. But I want you to have these skills, just in case.”

“What’s ‘unprecedented’?” Jacey asked.

Fuck, she was so  _ young _ .

“It means it’s never happened before,” Hubert explained patiently. “It’s the opposite of the ‘legal precedent’ Daddy talks about in his work that means the courts have made the same decision in the past. Was that clear?”

Jacey nodded and tucked the blunted knife into the wristband she wore under her dress sleeve. Hubert would have demanded she remove her other knives, that she’d been drilling with earlier, just in case she used the wrong one by mistake, but when she expected one knife and grabbed another, she responded viscerally and usually verbally. It used to worry Hubert, but she had just gotten better at reaching for the right knife and the problem had disappeared.

They had been working on sneaking about for months now. Eavesdropping, yes, but also just… sneaking. When Ferdinand had squawked and shrieked and eventually realized the appropriate person to scream at was Hubert, all because their smidgeon had snuck her way into the reading room and he hadn't noticed until she sneezed, Hubert had considered it a personal triumph. After all, there was only so much you could expect of an eight-year-old.

He'd set her the task of stealing or returning things before (no point giving things back the normal way when you could use it to get more practice), but she had seldom competed against his own skills.

"Your mission, whenever you feel ready, is to come into my study and pretend to slit my throat," Hubert told his daughter. "Do you want to do it with noise first so you will know what it looks like?"

"Where will you be sitting?" Jacey asked as her mind started planning: her route, her movements, her hands, the floor layout. Everything Hubert had taught her, and probably more. He could tell by the way her eyes zigzagged across the room.

"In the chair by the fire." A new chair, but the same placement his father had used to teach him. It had worked. "I will be reading."

"Then I have it," Jocelyn assured him, but she spent another moment staring at the floors and furniture along the path she would take before she looked at him and nodded.

Hubert reached out to stroke her hair, dark like his own. "This is not because I hope you will have to do it," he reminded her. "It is because I want you to have as many options at your disposal as possible. Best of luck, dust mite."

"The door hinges are oiled?" she asked, an excellent pre-sneaking question.

"The hinges  _ and  _ the handle and catch,” Hubert confirmed. He had handled it for her, but it was important to remember to be thorough. “There are no noise traps; it is just a room with some rugs and a crackling fire to help you." He would give her those challenges later, but for now, it was the simplest version of the task.

She left the room and Hubert took his pleasure reading book from the corner of his desk, an adventure novel about some pegasus knights. He eased into the chair by the fire and started to read.

Jocelyn was excellent. He had trained her himself, so of course she was, but she was also nine years old. She opened the door silently, but too fast, so that a draught came into the room. Her feet made no noise, but her breathing did, just barely, and he could track where she was--

"Eueauuueuhh....”

"Jocelyn?" Hubert said as he stood up and turned to her. She looked upset, her face contorted into a look of revulsion, her shoulders hunched, her arms drawn toward her, her hands hooked into tense claws.

"Sorry. Sorry," she said as she unfolded herself enough to reach into her right sleeve. "I just… Didn't notice I had a…" She fished a horse hair out of her sleeve and Hubert relaxed. "Should've done a check before I started."

"Yes. It's essential to check for all distractions before beginning a stealth mission," Hubert agreed. "Do you need to change your shirt?" She didn't usually react so strongly to animal hair, but perhaps it had been stabbing toward her skin.

"Maybe. I have another one…" She fished a second horse hair out, then shook out her arms and shoulders to check for more. "Okay. I'm alright," she assured him. “...No. I have…” She reached into the neck of her shirt and pulled out another hair. Then she rubbed her hands over her calves, forearms, and torso, double-checking. “Okay. I’m fine.”

“Some notes before you start again,” Hubert said, just as he would with one of his agents. “When you open a door, it is something like waving a giant fan. If you do it too quickly, it causes a breeze. You can slip up in a room with an open window, but not in my office in winter. Also, your breathing was a bit loud.”

Jocelyn nodded and said, “Got it,” and left the room.

Hubert hovered too much. He really needed to stop. His daughter made one small noise of disgust when she was intending to be silent, and it set his heart racing. He breathed deeply and focused on his book to return to the calm he’d had before.

The door was perfect this time. Hubert could tell because he was in the middle of an exciting flight scene and suddenly became aware of the barest shifting of fabric across the room. The tiniest sound of breathing that Hubert had been trained to pick up.

The strike came right after the fire crackled, a good strategy, but Hubert caught his daughter’s wrist the way his father used to catch his wrist, back when he was a scrawny, noisy little thing, too.

“Not quite,” he said. “The breathing is the most difficult. The door was perfect, though.”

And then he paused.

He had the wrist of his not-silent-enough child in his hand. Her big, amber eyes held nothing but determination. He had never been on this side of the encounter. This was the moment when…

When…

_ A burning cigar was pressed to his wrist. Father made him turn around and lashed him across the shoulders with a switch. He was conclusively told he wouldn’t be eating dinner that night. _

He dropped Jacey’s arm like a hot rock. She re-sheathed her knife, still at the ready, and smiled as she said, “Breathing. Got it.”

What was Hubert supposed to do now?

He was in no state to calm himself, that was for certain. To run this test at all, you had to have a good grip on yourself. It was straightforward with his agents, but all of his agents were adults, some of them older than him.

“I forgot I have something to see to tonight,” he said, unable to disguise the tension in his voice. “I apologize for cutting this short. We can try again tomorrow.” He stood and straightened his vest. “It was an excellent first attempt,” he said, which was something he would say to his adult agents. Was it too formal to say to his daughter? He was too upset to judge his tone properly.

“I’m gonna be even better tomorrow night,” Jacey promised, excited to show her father how well she could do. Just like Hubert used to be, but happy. Or at least, happier than he had been at that age, he hoped.

“Alright, then, run along to your room and practice if you feel so confident,” Hubert told her. “Oh, but Jacey?” She turned toward him, still alert as anything as they prepared to leave Hubert’s study. “It’s a bad night for eavesdropping. Best to keep to yourself, for the time being, smudge.”

She grudgingly agreed and ran off, and Hubert went to find Ferdinand.

He found his husband in the reading room, dressed for lounging in his nightshirt and robe. Without any greeting, Hubert said, "I need all your materials on learning and incentives."

"That was all years ago, now," Ferdinand said before looking up. "It'll all be in-- Hubert, what happened?"

Ferdinand frowned at him, that now-familiar furrow set into his brow, and he stood and pushed Hubert into the comfy chair instead. "You look like you saw a ghost. I thought you were playing with Jacey."

Something pathetically close to a whimper came out of Hubert's throat.

"Here. Chamomile. For nerves," Ferdinand said, and a warm teacup was pushed into Hubert's hands. He sipped from it like he would from a mug, warming his hands on it.

"Now, what on Earth happened, Hubert?" Ferdinand asked after Hubert had had several sips of Ferdinand's chamomile tea and gotten his breathing in order.

"I just remembered my father," Hubert said, trying to sound casual, aware he was failing miserably. "Remembered the things he did in the name of teaching me. That was all."

"Your wrists, right?" Ferdie asked quietly.

"And some of my back," Hubert agreed. "I showed Jacey a game-- a  _ challenge _ my father would set for me in that room, by that fire. She has the same bad habits I used to, did you know that? Breathing too loudly." He put his cup down on the side table and sank down to rest his elbows on his knees, his head hanging. "And I caught her, because she's nine, and then… I don't know." He drew in a shaky breath. "What comes next, Ferdinand? How do you show your child it's life-or-death without scarring it into their skin? Why did he do any of that to me if there was another way?"

A warm hand massaged the back of his neck. "It will only hurt you to pretend his cruelty had a purpose," Ferdinand said quietly. "He did it to be cruel. To exert control."

Hubert nodded and sniffed. "How?" he asked, and he didn't like how small his voice had become. "Jocelyn is… She's everything, Ferdie. If anyone hurt her, I would flay them alive. Was I really such a terrible child?" He couldn't imagine anything Jocelyn could do that would make him love her any less.

Ferdinand shushed him and leaned over to kiss the back of his head. "Of course you were the same," he soothed. He was so good at sounding certain; how could he be so sure when Hubert had deserved-- "You were perfect, Hubert, just like Jocelyn. I am sure of it." His hand moved across Hubert's shoulders. "You were only a child, my love. It was never your fault."

"I must have done something," Hubert insisted. "I must have been… stubborn, or whiny, or  _ anything _ . Anything to explain why he could do that to me and I could never imagine doing something like that to her." All the pain he'd endured, all the fear, what purpose did it serve? Why was it? It wasn't possible that it had all been meaningless. There had to be something, any justification.

"Hubert, he--"

"It must have been me!" Hubert yelled, shaking Ferdinand's hand off and sitting up. "Because, if it wasn't me, then he looked at me just the same way I looked at Jocelyn, and he decided an innocent child could use a burn on his wrist." And that was beyond monstrous. It was beyond anything Hubert could imagine. "For breathing too loudly, Ferdinand, for breathing." Ferdinand touched his face and he leaned into the hand without thinking.

"How much would Jocelyn have to whine, do you think, before you would consider treating her like that?" Ferdinand asked quietly, neutrally.

Jocelyn didn't whine, not unless it was warranted. It meant she was tired, or hurting, or hungry, or stretched beyond her limits, and he could hardly blame her for speaking up for herself. "I wouldn't," Hubert admitted. If his answer had been anything else, he knew, Ferdinand would never have had a child with him.

"How stubborn would she have to be, then?" Ferdie asked, and moved his hand to comb his fingers through Hubert's hair.

"She is very seldom stubborn," Hubert protested.

"She is my child," Ferdinand corrected him. "She knows her own mind. And, just a few weeks ago, she refused to curry her pony and then refused her dinner, both on the same day."

"Yes, but she got a cold the next day and we all… understood… I am proving your point for you now."

"How stubborn would she have to be, my love?" Ferdinand asked again, and then kissed Hubert on the cheek.

"How do I do better?" Hubert asked, now, feeling his resolve building. He could still barely raise his voice above a whisper. "How do I fix this for her? You did months of research on this."

"Mmh. How do your other games go?" Ferdie asked, and leaned the crown of his head against Hubert's shoulder affectionately. 

"We just… start again," Hubert admitted. "Like a regular game. With a hand-clap game as a prize when she succeeds." Little girls, as it turned out, were the source of an infinite variety of hand-clap games. It took him back to when Edelgard had wanted to play them with him.

"Then do that," Ferdie told him, and turned his head so Hubert could feel him shift, nestling his scalp against Hubert's shoulder. "She likes it, and it must work. That was all my research said, Hubert: make it fun, and increase the difficulty slowly, and reward a good job." He sat up and smiled at Hubert. "You are already doing that."

Hubert nodded and tried to calm himself some more. "Do I tell her about it?" he asked Ferdinand, who was moving his hand across Hubert's back as a sort of reminder that he was there. "It will bring up memories no matter what. They could be very upsetting. I wouldn't want her to think I was pulling away from her."

"Then tell her," Ferdinand confirmed. "You know how to broach difficult topics with her. She is very understanding when things are laid out for her."

_ But not when she has to figure them out on her own _ , Ferdinand didn't say. And he was right: if Hubert drew back into himself for seemingly no reason while playing with his daughter, she would think it was her fault. But she tended to believe the things they told her, so if he said that sort of behavior was the fault of his father, and not anything she had done, she would be prepared and not worry so much.

Hubert sighed and wondered if he should do it that night. It should probably wait until the morning, so Hubert could calm himself and prepare for the conversation, but on the other hand, Jacey had been sent to her room fairly early in the evening after nearly succeeding at her newest test.

He heard the barest rustle of fabric outside the door to the servants' stairs, and he stood and ran to open the door.

He caught Jocelyn's wrist when she was half a flight up, and looked up at her frightened, startled eyes. "I'm not mad," he said first thing as he started to pull her down into the reading room, shifting his grip to hold her hand instead. "But I don't know what you heard, and we need to discuss it."

"Is that Jocelyn?" Ferdinand asked as Hubert approached the reading room door again. "Jacey, you're turning out just like your father."

"Is that… bad?" their daughter asked, looking nervous as Hubert put a hand on the back of her shoulder to guide her into a chair.

"Certainly not," Ferdie told her, smiling. "I did marry him, after all." He reached for Hubert's hand and kissed it, and then told the pair of them, "I'll leave you to discuss this. I think that would be best." He still waited for Hubert's nod before he left.

Hubert moved another chair -- the one he’d just been sitting in -- to face Jacey’s chair at a slight angle. He sat down and leaned toward her a bit. “How much did you hear?” he asked, rather than admit that he wasn’t quite sure what he’d said in his panic.

“I heard the part where you were yelling at Daddy,” Jacey told him, which could have been a few parts of that conversation. “Am I… a bad child?” Hubert froze just long enough for her to say “I don’t want to be whiny or stubborn, or freeze up, but it just  _ happens  _ and I can’t stop it--”

“It’s not you,” Hubert said, because those were the first words he could think of to interrupt her. “It’s nothing to do with you, Jocelyn. I was having doubts about myself, and all Daddy was saying was that, if I can be understanding with you, then my own father should have been more understanding with me when I was young. You’re a very good child. You could probably stand to listen when I tell you not to eavesdrop, though.” He would really have preferred to have this conversation in the morning, without Jocelyn misinterpreting her fathers’ words.

“Can I ask why next time?” she asked. “You seemed like you wouldn’t tell me why, before.”

“And I probably wouldn’t have,” Hubert admitted. “But, since you did listen in, I think I should tell you that the reason I didn’t want you listening was because I was very upset and I knew I was going to say some things that would be easy to misunderstand.” He reached out and took her hand. “I was hoping to have a private conversation with just Daddy, because he already knew about what my father did to me and also because he spent about a year learning how children learn best, so that he could write the education laws. I wanted to be certain of the best way to teach you.”

“...Because your father taught you badly?” Jacey guessed.

“He taught me by hurting me when I failed,” Hubert said. Beating around the bush would only lead to worse misinterpretation. “It was the way people knew how to teach then, but I think he also liked having that kind of power over me.” He took a deep breath and let go of her hand to start unbuttoning his right sleeve. “The part you overheard… I love you so much, Jocelyn. I would do anything to protect you, which is why I’ve been teaching you to protect yourself. We reached a point in your training that reminded me of when I was learning the same thing, and it came home for me how impossible it would be for me to treat you the way my father treated me.” He finally got his buttons undone and turned his wrist over to show his daughter. “If I make a mistake, or snap at you, I want you to know it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with my own memories.”

Jocelyn’s fingers hovered over his forearm, millimeters from his skin. “Do they hurt?” she asked.

“Not anymore,” Hubert told her. “You can touch them if you want.” It was good for her to know. She would be trained in interrogation one day; she needed to know what burns looked like once they were healed.

She touched one of the marks with a very gentle finger, feeling its texture and toughness compared to the rest of his skin. “What are they?” she asked.

The things she didn’t know…

“Cigar burns. He smoked, so it was on hand.” The way his soot smudge focused in on his old injuries was unnerving, but it was the same way she studied anything new. “When a person wants to hurt you, little mite, they’ll find a way to tell you it was your fault. When they don’t want to hurt you, they’ll find a way not to even if it’s the difficult option.”

Jocelyn’s eyes left his arm, and she stood up and came to sit in his lap instead, to wrap her arms around his neck. Just like when she was small.

“What’s this for?” Hubert asked as he wrapped his arms around her middle. How long until she outgrew this? She was turning out tall, like her fathers. Edelgard had already started muttering about ‘treasonous growth spurts,’ even though she still had a good four inches on the girl.

“I just thought you needed it,” Jocelyn said, and kissed him on the cheek.

Hubert leaned back and pulled her with him. “That’s very kind of you, smidgeon. I’m sorry if I scared you with this.” He stroked her long hair as she leaned against his chest.

“Are we still doing the sneaking game tomorrow?” she asked with a slight whine in her voice.

“I promised, didn’t I?” Hubert asked her, and kissed the top of her head. “I keep my promises.”

“And you’re not gonna send me to bed early?” she confirmed.

Hubert smiled. “Probably not. But I… I do want to be very clear.” He stroked her hair a few times, glad she was at an angle that didn’t allow her to see his face. “It may dredge up bad memories for me, and none of them are your fault. I'll do everything I can to ensure that all your espionage memories are good ones, but I didn't have the guidance I should have had, so I need you to help me, okay, smudge? If something feels wrong, tell me?"

She nodded against his shoulder, and he nodded in return, and he held her on his lap.

After several long moments, when the world felt right again, Jocelyn shifted and Hubert vaguely recalled how difficult it was for children to sit still, so he sat upright again and said, "Alright, then, smudge, I think it's time for you to beat me at that counting game so we can feel a bit silly before bed," and she readily went back into her own chair and they clapped, then clapped once with their right hands, clap, once with their lefts, clap, then both hands back and front

Clap, right, clap, right, clap, left, clap, left, clap, back-front, clap, back-front

Clap, right, clap, right, clap, right, clap, left, clap, left, clap, left, clap, back-front, clap, back-front, clap, back-front

It was a deceptively straightforward game and Hubert, for the life of him, could not figure out why he was so terrible at it. He only reached nines before he tried to clap the backs of his hands against the front of Jocelyn's left hand and she won.

"Winning on your own age; that has to be lucky," Hubert declared. Then he stood and rolled his shoulders and said, "I need to turn in early. Don't get into any trouble Daddy can't handle; you know he isn't sneaky at all."

Jocelyn agreed and almost certainly ran off to find Ferdinand. Ferdie liked to talk with her about legal language and sentence structure, and all the building blocks of the Adrestian legal codes. Or maybe they would sing together, instead. Or both.

Either way, Hubert was headed to bed.

.-._.-._.-._

At sixteen years old, Jocelyn von Aegir und Vestra had been set the task of fake-assassinating her father sometime that week. All obstacles allowed (except Vestra spells), no witnesses permitted, the real deal. The knives she customarily wore under her sleeves were her usual set, but for one. Yesterday, she had oiled the handle and catch of the door of Father's study, a good, traditional place to do this exercise, and three days ago she had oiled the hinges. Just before dinner, she'd come in and ensured the layout was as she expected, entering and leaving through the back hallway. After dinner, Father had taken a cup of coffee while she and Daddy had enjoyed dessert, saying he was retiring to his study to finish up some things, and now, in her bedroom, Jocelyn scried on her father with the mirror Aunt Dorothea had sent for her thirteenth birthday along with a book of spells and sigils. He was in exactly the spot where they'd started, seven years ago, but with his chair angled so he could see the main door; she'd have to use the other one. The one she'd used to get the layout earlier.

What this told her was that Father was scared. They were only on day four and he knew she was angling in for the kill.

She checked her knives to be sure the blunted one was in its place. She checked her shirt and trousers to be sure there were no distractions, no hairs or scratchy bits or folds out of place. She straightened her stockings so they lay perfectly, and did a few extra stitches on her embroidery so it could look like she'd just gotten a bit distracted from it, as usual. She tied up her long black hair. She drew her blunted knife. She left her shoes in her room.

From before she left her room, she walked silently, the way she'd learned so early it felt like there had always been two ways to walk. She closed the back door of her room silently and padded down the old servants' hallway, from when houses like hers were full of people just so the owners could show off their wealth. She breathed silently.

The lock did not click as she silently entered the room. To scry again before entry would be to risk Father noticing the glow of magic, or more likely the sound, so she just had to trust he was stationary. In any other house, she could have looked through the keyhole, but Vestra had covered their locks since time immemorial.

And she was in.

Father breathed silently, too. He was especially suspicious of her, then, but his sensitivity was nothing compared to hers, never had been, and he didn't hold back for the drama of it all anymore; she truly was winning.

Then she encountered  _ something _ on the ground. A smattering of sand, or something. A shudder ran up her body and she forced herself not to gasp, not to groan, not even to wince too hard. She only allowed herself to move in ways that wouldn't make her clothing make noise. It was an especially pernicious trap left especially for her, in her stockingfeet, so much more sensitive than anyone but Daddy (and he wouldn't be in here in socks, and he would pause and then complain, not seize up from it). But this was the big test. She was winning this. She had one more step, and she would be there.

She placed her other foot gingerly on the sand trap she knew was waiting for her, and that brought her close enough. In complete silence, she grabbed the top of Father's head and drew her blunted knife across his throat hard enough for him to know she meant business.

She grinned and then laughed when it caused him to yell out, "Saints and swords, Jocelyn, what the fuck?!"

Then Father laughed, too, and hugged her, and congratulated her on a job well done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's all, folks! I can feel the brainworm crawling out of my ear as I type this.
> 
> The next day, Hubert takes Jacey out and they both get affogatos and they also both laugh at the face Ferdinand makes when he realizes they're going to get espresso.

**Author's Note:**

> This AU gave me brainworms, so there's going to be another chapter and it's ABSOLUTELY going to be about Hubert teaching Jacey how to sneak around properly.


End file.
